Sometimes you don't make what you want to make.

Zipsit originally believed parents would use an on-demand app for babysitters and planned to front the cost of background checks for all their babysitters. The upfront cost was huge but they trusted it would taper as parents developed a rapport with a babysitter and added the babysitter to their sitter circle. A sitter circle is a small group of sitters with whom parents felt most comfortable trusting.

Something didn't feel right. Zipsit realized they should focus on the sitter circle and ditched the idea of random babysitters and costly background checks. They decided to let parents curate their own sitter circle and shifted the vetting responsibility onto the parents. With this new model, the sitters you added to your sitter circle were people you already knew.

Prototyping

Alex was introduced to the Zipsit team one week after the kickoff meeting. His experience in designing a marketplace babysitting service in the Ukraine gave him a clear understanding of what was needed for Zipsit and he was able to introduce a prototype within a couple of weeks.

• Invision

Planning

As with most Coplex clients, the design phase communication with the Zipsit team was mainly through basecamp. Clients also interact with our staff via the Basecamp threads and each week a budget and progress report goes out to the client for them to understand how their product is progressing.

• Basecamp

Development

Steven has built several marketplace apps in the past so his experience really helped in creating Zipsit. Before development started, Steven put in a list of User Stories into the Icebox. The Icebox is where features are kept to be estimated and prioritized.

When development starts, we drag Stories from the icebox to Current and based on the velocity of the team's development, the Stories either stay in Current or overflow to the Backlog. As velocity increases, stories are brought over from the Backlog into the Current column so the team can continue to work uninterrupted.

• Parse for db
• Braintree Payments for credit card processing
• Venmo for payouts.

• Pivotal

Iteration 1

Once the app is available in the iTunes store, the first step for Zipsit is to conduct some unbiased testing with parents and sitters. To do that, the Zipsit team will have a closed circle beta test of parents and sitters. Each sitter will be sent 'Syt Requests' through the app and the parents will post Syt Requests for several weeks.

The testing for this closed circle is outlined via test cards. Each test card lists a hypothesis that the team would like to prove, an action they will do to test, a metric by which they will measure success, and an expected outcome that will confirm their hypothesis.

• Test Cards

Future

Zipsit will need to support multiple and interconnected sitter circles in order to grow exponentially. Currently, the sitter side of their 2-sided market only grows when the parent side introduces new sitters. Allowing sitters to apply to sitter circles through a questionnaire and enable interviewing will help get babysitters for fringe users who don't already have fellow parents with sitters.